Survation Brexit poll spooks sterling as Leave vote grows

The pound lost all its gains from the morning after a poll for IG by Survation showed a strong gain for those backing a Brexit vote at Thursday's EU referendum.

The Survation phone poll showed the 'Remain' vote stayed at 45% compared to 44% for 'Leave', up two percentage points as the share of undecided voters shrank to 11%.

Excluding undecided voters, the poll, which was conducted on Monday and published at 1330 BST on Tuesday, found Remain was on 50.5% and Leave on 49.5%.

Not long after the results were reported, sterling was down 0.07% to 1.4688 against the dollar, having touched 1.4774 only a few hours earlier, almost its 2016 high.

At the same time, Remain's lead with bookmaker Betfair had fallen slightly to a 76% chance.

The poll follows another phone poll from ORB for the Telegraph newspaper published overnight that showed that among definite voters, Remain had a seven-point lead, with 53% of the vote compared to Leave’s 46%.

A YouGov full poll for the Times showed 42% likely to vote remain, 44% to leave, but 9% undecided. However, including undecided voters then Remain's lead was whittled down to just 49.0% against 47.0%.

According to Ladbrokes, the chances of a 'Remain' vote had shortened to 2/7, with about 95% of all bets over the previous 24 hours had been placed on voters rejecting Brexit.